Interview Details

“Aboriginal people have found a way to laugh ourselves through just about every kind of horrific condition and survive,” Maracle says. Always an outspoken advocate of women’s and Native rights, she delivers a knockout punch with her blend of essay and short story, “First Wives Club: Salish Style”, a hilarious riff on how Salish women saved each other from a devastating flood by climbing to the top of a mountain. They knew that it would take many women—but only one man—to repopulate the village.

“The heroes in most of our flood stories are women,” Maracle writes. “Sisters who saved elders, other sisters, their children…the women did not generally rescue men; at least if they did rescue a man, the story did not get handed down in my family.”

Read the rest of this interview with Lee Maracle, a member of the Sto:lo Nation and prominent contributor to the new anthology on Native sexuality, Me Sexy, compiled and edited by Drew Hayden Taylor.